Highly carcinogenic blue asbestos waste on the Owendale Asbestos Mine tailings dump, near Postmasburg, Northern Cape. The prevailing wind was in the direction of the mine officals' houses at right. 21 December, 2002, 2002

Basel 2018
Highly carcinogenic blue asbestos waste on the Owendale Asbestos Mine tailings dump, near Postmasburg, Northern Cape. The prevailing wind was in the direction of the mine officals' houses at right. 21 December, 2002

Goodman Gallery

Photography
Pigment inks on cotton rag paper
Edition of 10
111.0 x 135.0 (cm)
43.7 x 53.1 (inch)
David Goldblatt has photographed the people, landscapes and structures of South Africa for over seventy years. This photograph is taken from a small series within his broader body of colour landscapes, which critically examines the after effects of asbestos mining in South Africa. Goldblatt explains, plainly, that the companies that mined asbestos in the country were contemptuous of the health and lives of those who took the material out of the ground, those who milled, packed and transported it, those who lived anywhere near these operations, and of the land from which they took it. Long after the connections between asbestos and asbestos-related diseases were established, they continued to work the mines with only minimal changes, they held the workforces in ignorance of the dangers to which they were exposed and hindered research that harmed their interests. And when all was over, when they had either worked out the ore or when they had lost their markets because the world got wise to asbestos, they simply ceased operations and walked away, leaving vast and lethal quantities of asbestos tailings to blow in the wind.